3rd World Products: Book 15, page 13
Reaching to touch my arm, Barb asked, “Ed, what is it?"
Putting up a screen and giving each probe one side of it, I let her see what I was doing as I sent the probes upward a hundred feet and had them orbit their areas. Still nothing. Okay, maybe on Deltona Boulevard? I had the probes meet at Deltona and head north and south and the southbound probe found the source of the noise within five blocks. An SUV lay on its side blocking the northbound side of the road and some kind of a small white car was upside down in the grassy median.
Standing up, I asked, “You coming along?"
Getting to her feet, she asked, “Aren't you going to call 911?"
"On the way, yeah. Tiger, see you later, okay?"
He hopped onto the table for some last minute patting and yowled, “Okay!"
On the front porch, we hopped on our boards and Barb followed me southeast. I poked up a blank screen and called 911 to report the accident, then disconnected when the dispatcher got insistently chatty. Landing by the SUV, I looked inside it.
The woman who'd been driving looked seriously injured and two kids lay squalling in the back seat. I didn't bother checking them over; I just said, “Athena.” She appeared beside me, saw the situation, and walked directly into the SUV through its exposed undercarriage. The squalling stopped immediately.
A duplicate of Athena appeared by the little white car, then vanished as she linked to me and said, “The man in the car is dead."
Several blocks away, I saw a fire truck pull out of the Forest Oaks station and head in our direction, siren wailing and lights ablaze. Barb remained above the SUV as I flitted over to the white car and called up two flitters to block traffic with bright red fields, then got down on the ground by the car to have a look inside. Yup, the mid-thirties driver was very dead, from the look of him. I checked his pulse to confirm Athena's words and my impression. No pulse. The car and the corpse reeked of booze. As the fire truck arrived and parked in the median, I stood up and saw a cop car turning onto Deltona a few blocks further south.
Barb drifted over, stepped off her board, and said, “You didn't seem to be in any hurry to get over to this guy."
Watching the cop car approach, I asked, “Didn't you see Athena over here?"
"No."
I shrugged. “Oh, well. She said he was dead, so I didn't hurry."
Two firemen went straight to the white car. Another one in a yellow helmet asked if we'd been involved in the accident, then looked at his guys by the car. I didn't hear the guy say anything, but the yellow-hat turned his attention to the SUV.
Barb asked, “But you knelt and checked his pulse anyway?"
"Yup. Somebody would ask why I didn't."
"What about the woman and her kids?"
"Athena's treating them. I'll talk with the bears."
"Bears?"
"Sheriff's Deputies don't like being called ‘cops'."
Barb snorted a chuckle that sounded almost involuntary. “But they don't mind being called ‘bears'?"
"They've never corrected me about it."
The deputy parked behind the car and talked on his radio as he quickly walked over to it, looked inside, and then turned to me.
I said, “We just stopped to help. My flitters will block traffic ‘til you have your markers in place."
The deputy came closer and said, “I know who you are. I've seen you in Greer's office a few times. Did you see the accident?"
"Nope, just heard it."
"From what I've heard about you, you'd say that anyway."
I shrugged. “Prob'ly so. Not this time, though."
Another cop car powered down the slight hill from the north and parked behind the SUV. As that deputy got out, an ambulance appeared from the same direction, then two more cop cars. The deputies spread out to set up flares and cones and guide the ambulance into place near the SUV.
As we watched, the SUV began to tilt. I could see the three people inside suspended in the air and moving to avoid contact with the SUV as it apparently rolled itself back onto its wheels. The shattered windows suddenly crumbled away and the three patients floated out to hover a few feet above the ground. One of my flitters moved into place beneath them and Athena and two of the medics boarded it, then it soared away to the north.
I said, “Good ‘nuff,” and called up my board.
Barb asked, “You're just leaving?"
"They know where to find me."
Launching her own board, Barb rose into the sky with me and asked, “What about Athena?"
"Maybe some nice fireman will give her a ride home."
She looked askance at me and snorted, “Try again."
"Well, she could just vanish, I suppose."
As the southernmost deputy set out his last flare, I let the remaining flitter vanish, put up a screen, and pinged Athena. She answered with, “Yes, Ed."
"Were they properly impressed, ma'am?"
"I believe so."
"Great. Barb was worried about you."
Athena appeared on my board and looked at Barb as she said, “Thank you, but I'll be fine,” then vanished.
Barb seemed startled, but contained it. We landed on my porch and I let us into the house. She looked around as she headed for the kitchen and picked up her unfinished drink as she asked, “Where's Tiger?"
I felt around, didn't detect his presence in the house, and said, “He probably went back to Annabelle's for the evening."
Taking a seat at the table, Barb sipped and said, “Too bad. I like cats."
Also taking a seat, I said, “He'll probably be back tomorrow. Annabelle's become more and more reluctant to leave Martha alone. She's in her eighties."
"How's her health?"
"No idea, but she's still above ground."
There were a few moments of silence, then Barb asked, “Do you think animals know when someone's about to die?"
"I dunno. Could be. They know other stuff before we do."
I guess she took that as a form of assent, because she told me a story about an aunt whose dog had gone downstairs and raised hell until her uncle had followed the dog upstairs. Her aunt had been as confused as her uncle about why the dog was upset, but as they'd talked about it, she'd had a heart attack.
She finished with, “So Bitsy the dog became a family hero, but my uncle once suggested that all her insane barking caused it.” Shrugging, she said, “That damned dog went nuts all the time anyway."
Pulling a foot up on her chair, Barb draped an arm over her knee and lounged against the chair back, staring at her still-unfinished drink. I've seen the look in her eyes before in others; it's a sign of indecision or the kind of mild confusion that makes a person question things when they'd really rather not.
Sometimes it leads to long conversations, other times it leads to quiet thoughtfulness. Usually it means whatever other plans might have been made will get scrapped. Well, let her work things out and get back to me later. I linked to my part of Athena's core and tried to do some studying about fields and gravity as Barb silently rubbed the bottom of her glass on the table in small circles.
The core produced formulas and even some diagrams, but the captions in the pictures made little sense. The Amaran I'd picked up along the way could carry me through light conversational chat, but it wasn't up to the task of deciphering much of anything on the screens of data.
That bugged me, too. What now seemed ages ago I'd picked up languages as necessary. Germans had often thought I was German back in the seventies. My French hadn't been quite as extensive, but what little I'd used had caused people to think I was from the Geneva or Neuchâtel region of Switzerland. I credited that to my last French instructor, a woman from the town of Bevaix.
Amaran sounded almost like Icelandic to me now, but not quite. I'd once told Ellen I'd heard most of the tall, white languages and hers wasn't among them. I'd only been about half right, I think. What I'd heard then—and lately, of course—now sounded sort of like Icelandic that'd had centuries to warp and twist itself into something sort of new, likely the same way English had evolved from ancient German via centuries of isolation from the mainland.
As I sat there thinking, it occurred to me to wonder why I'd never asked about that. Dumping the field and gravity info, I pulled up info about Amara and its language and shortly learned that what I'd been learning and speaking and thinking of as ‘Amaran’ was and wasn't, really. It was a combination of Amaran, proto-Norse, early Norn, and Faroese which belonged to the population of two small continents in the southern hemisphere of Amara, both of which had been depopulated over two thousand years ago by volcanism that had caused the rapid onset of their ice age.
That extreme volcanic activity had caught the Amarans by surprise and billions of people had been killed by gases and ash falls. After almost a decade the volcanism had stopped as abruptly as it started, but by then, most of the planet's surface had become uninhabitable due to atmospheric changes. Glacial ice had quickly advanced in both hemispheres almost halfway to Amara's equator.
Images of that time provided by satellites and reconnaissance craft showed the gradual clouding of the atmosphere and the start of a planetary snowball effect. Hm. The theorists were apparently right about places like Yellowstone's caldera; if they blew, we could expect the same results. On Amara, the first eruption had triggered a second caldera's eruption, which explained both hundred-foot deep ash deposits on the southern continents and the rapid onset of the ice age.
Survival meant going underground or leaving the planet. Amara couldn't provide adequate transportation or shelter for its remaining millions, but dozens of relatively nearby client worlds had provided Amaran refugees with transportation and absorbed them into their own populations. Those who'd gone underground on the three largest continents received various assistances from those worlds for a time, but that help ended when they declared themselves fully self-sufficient a decade later.
In fact, the term ‘self-sufficient’ hadn't been altogether accurate. Ice almost a mile thick blanketed much of their world and what had been their surface civilization, to include every means of mining and manufacturing the staples of that civilization. Amarans learned to make do, hollowing out a few mountains almost by hand to create vast hydroponic gardens and utilizing geothermal energy to provide power.
Recovery expeditions to ice-free locations brought back chunks of their pre-disaster technology and that tech was used to create more tech until everyone had a comfortable standard of living. In order to have something to exchange with their erstwhile client worlds, the Amarans made themselves the premier source of education and research among those worlds.
But even that hadn't been quite enough to cover redevelopment expenses. The Amarans had leased vast tracts of their planet to resource-hungry other worlds in order to raise cash, but several promising starts at mining had failed against the ice. In fact, it was discovered that the only resources valuable enough to make mining and interplanetary shipment economically viable were the very resources the Amarans needed themselves. The situation became untenable...
Barb's hand touched my arm as she said firmly, “Ed."
I put my link to the core on hold and replied, “Yes'm?"
"I called you twice. Are you okay?"
Sipping coffee, I said, “Just thinking. You seemed to drift away into your own little world a while ago, so I drifted away to mine."
Sitting back, she glanced into her now-empty glass and asked, “Where's that?"
How to answer? Hm. The truth would work well enough, as usual. With a small grin, I said, “Another place and time."
Her left eyebrow arched slightly and she almost hesitantly asked, “Did finding a man dead in that car ... upset you?"
I chuckled, “Nah. He reeked of booze. Glad he won't be on the road again."
That raised her other eyebrow, as well, then her gaze narrowed. “Ed, a man died tonight. That's not a source of amusement."
Giving her a direct look, I said, “Barb, I've lost too many friends to drunk drivers. It suits me just fine that there's one less out there, and it isn't up to you to approve or disapprove of my attitude on the matter. I just hope his insurance covers some or all of what he did to that woman and her kids. Want another drink?"
Looking at her glass again, Barb said, “A moment ago I wasn't sure. Now I am.” She got up and rinsed her glass, then set it in the sink and said, “I think I'll go to bed now.” Turning to face me, she added, “In the guest room."
I shrugged. “Sure. No problem. But if you'd prefer, I can get you a flitter back to Chicago or Carrington. Also no problem. Your choice."
"Are you asking me to leave?"
"Did I actually ask you to leave? No. I just offered you options. If you think you'll feel better tomorrow, stick around. You can use your board to..."
She interrupted me with, “I'll decide what to do tomorrow when tomorrow gets here. Thanks for putting me up for the night.” She glanced around and located her travel mug, picked it up, and said, “Good night,” then walked out of the kitchen.
Was I supposed to trail after her, apologizing for being boorish about a dead drunk? If so, too bad. Putting my feet on the chair across from mine, I reanimated the display regarding Amara and continued studying.
Amara had let resource exploitation go just so far, then complained about ecological damage. I almost laughed, but then considered that sooner or later, the ice would recede and deposit all the crap from mining and processing somewhere. Resource exploitation ended within a few years and Amara was again dependent on its less tangible assets of education and research. They scrimped by for another decade, then a research team discovered the key to manipulating gravity and what we now think of as ‘Amaran fields’ were born in total secrecy.
At first they tried to use the new tech to clear away ice, creating relatively small and field-enclosed ‘green zones’ for planting, but those were shut down almost immediately for fear ships from other worlds would spot them. A few such ships did indeed spot those small early efforts, but those efforts were explained away as failed attempts to reroute geothermal energy.
Instead, the field studies themselves were rerouted. Ways were found to alter the structure of substances and suddenly the ash and barren ice that had destroyed Amara became resources as they were transmuted to basic food compounds and other necessary raw materials. Further research produced field propulsion that was retrofitted into some of the vehicles that had survived the cataclysm.
Another half-century of development produced portable and even hand-held devices that could manipulate the fields generated by gravity conversion engines. Some wanted to export the technology. Others thought exporting it would end interdependences among worlds. After all, if you could make anything you wanted yourself, why bother to trade for it? The nay-sayers predicted worlds which acquired field tech would eventually become insulated societies. That argument went on for quite a while before programming safeguards everyone could accept came along.
In short, trying to open any field device would cause it to self-destruct instantly. For small devices, this was the equivalent of pulling the pin on a grenade. Boom. For other devices, an explosion would be too horrific, so the devices would essentially disintegrate in a high energy release while the escaping energy was routed in a safe direction as determined by an AI resident in the device.
This method of protecting Amaran tech was very successful. A few demonstrations convinced most people not to tamper with field devices. A few nasty explosions during attempted disassembly convinced the others. According to records, nobody had ever managed to reverse-engineer an Amaran field device. That made me remember Phillip Brinks, the insane junior genius who'd blown up on the asteroid station. If he hadn't reverse-engineered a PFM, how the hell had he changed his personal field frequencies to make himself unstoppable by the Stephanie who'd become station-Sara?
Athena pinged me. When I answered, she said, “Brinks didn't alter the PFM. He created a shell device that altered the frequency of its field and directed the fields for various purposes such as his shield."
"That would seem to mean he figured out the nature of field energy."
"It might only mean he got lucky with experimentation. He left no notes regarding field energy, so we have no knowledge of how he developed his shell device."
"Uh, huh. Well, wouldn't all that mean frequency shifting was known prior to our inventing it to keep Lori from pouncing on me in my dreams?"
Athena laughed, “Indeed it would, but only by AIs. The explosion that destroyed Brinks also destroyed his shell device and the stolen PFM. Because he incorporated the shell device into his belt pouch, there are no images of the device."
"Yet you somehow know of it and how it worked."
"Sara studied his last few visible moments and reconstructed his field effects in order to determine how they could be achieved."
"Did she share that info with 3rd World or the Amarans?"
"No."
"Then neither will I, milady."
"I didn't think you would, but thank you."
Tiger's ping sounded in my implant, then sounded again twice quickly. I put up a screen and saw him standing on Martha's coffee table. Martha lay slumped to her left on the couch behind him. Tiger didn't bother with a greeting. His loud yowling was rendered by his collar as, “Ed, something is very wrong with Martha!"
Before I could answer, Athena said, “Ed, I'm there and I'm attempting to revive her, but she isn't responding. I'll use theta waves on Tiger and Annabelle."
"Tiger,” I said, “Athena is doing all she can for Martha. I'll call an ambulance."
He answered, “Yes, okay!” and quickly went to stand beside Annabelle on the arm of the couch.
Linking to Athena, I asked, “Any luck, Athena?"
"No, Ed, but I'll continue to try until the ambulance arrives."
"Okay. Thanks. I'll call them now."
Switching the screen to blank, I used it to link into phone lines and called 911 for the second time that evening. After stating that an elderly woman had collapsed in her home and giving the location, I dropped that link and called Martha's niece, Sophie.
